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Friday, April 29, 2016

TALE OF TALES

This could be one of those fairy tales that doesn’t turn out happy ever after…except
maybe sometimes.Matteo Garrone,
director and his fellow writers (Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudiso)
based their production on an Italian folklorist (Giambattista Basile) who wrote
50 tales, and this is three of them.(Basile pre-dated the Grimm brothers in Germany.)

Garrone (Gomorrah),
who is known for weaving in the fantastical with the mythical/psychological, does
so again here inTale of Tales.The tales all involve kings who embody
the human condition of chasing after the elusive, being thwarted by fate/magic,
and being ultimately undone (or not).

The three kingdoms of the kings are
Longtrellis, Highhills, and Strongcliff.The first king, played by John C. Reilly, has a barren wife, and in
deference to her, is willing to do anything
to produce an heir.They are visited
by a seer who says, “You want a child?Every new life is cause for a life to be lost.”Heedless of the caveat, they say they
will do anything.Little do they
know what costs will be extracted from them and that the twins, born to
different mothers, have an extraordinary connection to one another.This will be significant in that one
twin’s mother is the queen, but the other one’s is a scullery maid.(More than a touch of magic here.)

The second king, played by Vincent Cassel,
expecting any woman he has a yen for to succumb to him, is bested by deceit and
duly horrified.But soon, he thinks
he has found his true love.Only…he doesn’t know how that love came to be.

The third king, played by Toby Jones, has a
beautiful daughter whom he dotes upon, but in getting preoccupied by a flea and
tending to it, he loses track of priorities and puts her at great risk.

Themes running through Tale of Tales are meaningful (thoughtless parenting, sibling
rivalry, bargains with the devil, obsession, and the main one, narcissism), but
they are presented as more of a curious look at human behavior than
illustrating moral principles.That conclusion is left up to the viewer.

I did enjoy humorous aspects of the film (a
woman thrown out of a castle window being caught up in tree limbs with her
lover’s crimson bedsheet still around her, a flea turning into an exotic beast
as a result of the king’s fascination, a woman desperate for regaining her
youth willing to do anything), but
the lack of integration among the three stories and the absence of any obvious
moral principle made the film seem less important.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky and music by
Alexandre Desplat more than made up for this drawback.Hayek, Cassel, Jones, and Reilly were
regal figures with very human qualities; they can be considered masters of
acting.